Kinect Could Hold Key to Next-Gen Baseball Biomechanics

It hasn’t been two weeks since San Francisco won the World Series, and the sport of baseball is already getting ready to spend millions of dollars on a new crop of free agents. Meanwhile, gamers around the country are getting ready to spend their own collective millions, this time on the Kinect, Microsoft’s revolutionary motion-gaming unit.

Over the last few years, the loss of over a billion dollars to injuries has become a critical topic of discussion for baseball teams, but few are doing much about it. Medical budgets for teams are significantly less than the cost of a mediocre player, and the willingness to let a player be rebuilt by renowned surgeons like James Andrews or Neal ElAttrache holds sway over simple prevention.

When the Washington Nationals lost young pitcher Stephen Strasburg to a torn ulnar collateral ligament this past summer, it seemed a nadir of pitcher development. Still, the Nats have “no plans,” according to one front office source, to start using more advanced methods (such as biomechanical analysis) in order to prevent the next such injury.

Glenn Fleisig is the top biomechanist in baseball, heading up the research labs at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. Set up by Andrews in the 1980s, ASMI has worked to improve the health and mechanics of baseball players at all levels. Its research has led to pitch restrictions on Little League players, a move that has reduced the occurrence of injuries to prepubescent pitchers.

Fleisig himself has been trying to get teams to send pitchers to his lab for years, getting a couple of takers, such as the Moneyball-era Oakland Athletics, but currently only three teams have any formal program of biomechanical analysis.

Some of it is the glacial pace of change in baseball, but cost is also a consideration. The Milwaukee Brewers are the only team to own and run their own biomechanical lab. The cost for the cameras, computers and software, as well as the engineers and doctors to do the analysis, can run in the neighborhood of a million dollars. But the team’s ability to get data on the arms of every pitcher in the organization is already starting to give it an information advantage. Now, that cost might soon be coming down, thanks to an unexpected source: Microsoft.

Earlier this month, Microsoft introduced its Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360. The peripheral uses a series of infrared and visual-spectrum cameras to construct a simple model that, in the words of Microsoft, turns “you into the controller.”

The model it uses is hardly as high-quality as the ones used by ASMI or the Brewers, but there’s reason to think it may yet be useful. If custom biomechanics software can be written that makes full use of the Kinect’s capabilities, its low cost and potential for broad distribution would allow for widespread initial screening, especially for youth-league pitchers. Pitchers that fall outside a set of accepted parameters could then be referred for more sensitive (and expensive) testing.

Proprietary research has shown that there are predictable limits to the amount of force the elbow and shoulder of a pitcher can take. While there are individual tolerance differences, calculating the force in the elbow — a simple hinge joint — is a reasonably accurate predictive exercise.

While Microsoft refused comment on any medical use for its peripheral, one game designer at a company that’s developing for the Kinect confirmed for Wired.com that the system does have the necessary capabilities to make those types of measurements. “There are already games that simulate the motion of tennis, of volleyball and other sports,” he told me. “Having one that simulates a baseball throw (and swing) is an easy one and could put baseball back on the gaming map.

“If the game is already calculating arm position and rotation in order to create realistic responses, there’s no reason that [data] couldn’t be collected and used the way motion capture is now.”

Fleisig had not yet seen the Kinect system when contacted for comment, but said that he was looking into the system for use in biomechanics. While few baseball sources seem to be familiar with the system — a Major League Baseball pitching coach reached by Wired.com knew that his son had an Xbox, but had not yet heard of the Kinect — the next six months will readily show whether the Kinect is a hit, both in living rooms and training rooms.